“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE”

“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE”

“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE”

“TO PLAY FAST AND LOOSE” is a phrase that appears both in
Love’s Labor’s Lost and in King John, and is
attributed to Shakespeare almost as often as “It’s Greek to me.”
But the OED finds the phrase in 1557 as the title of an
epigram in a popular miscellany (what we would now call an
“anthology”). The phrase originally referred to a sleight-of-hand
trick.